“Good afternoon, welcome to a sunshine Super Monday here in Alexandria, Virginia. What a Super Sunday it was. It’s just great to see that defense wins Super Bowls and World Championships. A phenomenal game. And just want a little shout out to the Philadelphia Eagles. The left of launch, boost phase defense was remarkable on their D-line hitting that quarterback before the ball was launched. Just a great display of integrated missile defense, excuse me, integrated defense on it.
And we have some old iron sides with us today that are going to really get into the discussion. They’re the original gangsters. And I think as the executive order pointed out, the first paragraph of the executive order by President Trump was referring all the way back to the first iteration, the SDI speech from Ronald Reagan, and then to the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Those are the two major inflection points of missile defense in our history. And now we are on the third inflection point that is here today. And I was giving Trey a hard time. I know we’re all going to be Domers but thank God it’s not the Golden Dome.
So we’re going in a good spot with the Iron Dome on that aspect of it. This is a lot of going back to the future. And we should look back at the future. This is the Holy Grail, so to speak, to be able to actually have an ability to defend the whole country from space. That battle, the Holy Grail of space, has been tried back in 1983, has been tried in 2002. It’s now being put forward by a president that is very pro-space on this, and the conditions are right now for that to happen. But if you go back to our country’s history, the U.S. Army was in control of putting forward a missile defense air defense system in the 70s, late 60s, that had both air defense and missile defense and Nike sites around the nation. So we’ve been there. We’ve done that aspect of it.
But now we’re in a situation right now where the president has put forward 60 days to come up with an architecture to defend the entire country, our population, our critical infrastructures, and that’s reality , if you look at it, it’s only 40 days because the architecture has got to be in before they push it through the tank into the JCS chair and everybody discuss which ways to go forward, what not to do. We are concerned that this process should not be what we’ve just witnessed with Guam. That’s five years of too many chefs in the kitchen and a process that cost our country five years of time and a process that we spent a lot of money on, and we eventually got to a service position. Right now, it looks from the outside that there is still that same problem with too many people in the kitchen to figure this out.
I think we want to address that today and look at what the essence of the problem to go forward is. We’ve got to be very clear with putting one person in charge of the architecture, putting one person in charge of the command. That’s the only way you’re going to get this thing done the way they want it done. They want a capability up in two years. It’s called urgency, and we haven’t done that. I think Trey did it with three years with the GMD system, but now that’s 20 years ago. Now, we’ve got to be able to push this thing as hard as we can. We are to understand this is at least $20 billion. This is double the MDA’s budget this first year. It’s most likely close to $80 or $100 billion over the next four to five years on this. It’s very clear inside the President’s executive order that this is not about past generation missile defense, this generation missile defense. This is about next generation missile defense.
It’s written all over that. I think we’ve got to understand that executive order is the policy. The MDR, Missile Defense Review, is now done. This is the policy of the United States of America with missile defense. There are some key language items in that policy document, like having capability sensors all up in space, having the ability to engage in space. It is a great document. It is not picking North Korea and Iran. It has taken on all our peers against all the threats. It’s not handpicking different threats and letting nuclear deterrence carry other threats. We now have a blank piece of paper here to do it, but we have to do it right. We have to get away from the processes that we’ve been in over the last 40 years on missile defense and be able to execute this big dream and make the holy grail real. We want to have an opportunity here today to discuss what those challenges are.”
-Mr. Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman
“Now, for me, this talks about at least four different types of programs. One is that the space layer is critical. You and I have discussed this in multiple advisories. It’s not just detection and tracking, which I think is a first and second epoch. In other words, in the next two to four years, we’re going to see some of that. But it’s about engagement from space. And people need to really understand what the Space-Based Weapons Treaty says. It doesn’t prohibit the use of weapons from space. It prohibits the use of nuclear weapons. And that engagement, it’s probably in the third or fourth epoch. It’s six and eight years from now. But you’ve got to make those investments today to start being ready for that. And I’m not even sure that eventually is the most expensive engagement solution. I mean, there’s a beauty to relying on gravity instead of three rocket motors slapped on the back of each other to get a weapon up into space.
The second big program is the glide phase intercept. Look, MDA was forced, their hand was forced last year into picking one of two choices. It was forced by a limited DoD budget for missile defense. That’s no longer going to be the limit, the limiting factor. So, allow the MDA director to step back, whether he wants to admit he made a mistake or whether it was forced to this, I don’t care. Allow both glide phase intercept programs to go. Not because one’s better than, one may be better than the other. I bet the one he picks is the best one. They’re smart dudes at MDA, as I’ve said. But one of them delivers a lot sooner than the other. And what you want to do is get one out there, so you have some defense. That’s your epoch one and two. And then the longer, more beautiful, as the president would say, more beautiful, big glide phase intercept, you let that, you paid for that. And what you tell that company is, hey, the sooner you deliver, the less we buy that other stuff, and the more we buy of your stuff. But let there be some competition in there and get both glide phase going. Plus, if we’re going to build five offenses, I mean, we got Army, Navy, Air Force, you know, DARPA, I’m telling you, you know, offensive weapons. I bet the Coast Guard would build one if they could figure it out. You know, we need, it’s okay to have two defensive hypersonic weapon systems.
The third thing, Riki, is we’re going to have to have persistent high-altitude sensors. Look, I know services don’t like to hear this. They’re called dirigibles or aerostats. But if you have them up there with firing quality track sensors, you’re going to get large coverage areas. You’re going to be able to, over time, there’ll be lower cost for construction, lower cost for execution over time, manpower wise, versus, say, a permanent aircraft, you know, on a 24-7. And it gives you flexibility for surging them up and down where you locate them. And then, and I know they’re ugly. And I know no one wants to have like the one wing set of wings. You know, it’s awful. But we got to get back in the dirigible business.
And then finally, we’ve got to, you know, we got to get the crew, the engagement cruise missile part down. One of the good things is, is we’re finding out the really low cost of a Mark 41 VLS when it’s not on a ship, but ashore. I think we’re in the 42 million range, somewhere around there to have, you know, you know, the 30, the 32 cells there. That’s a good deal. And cells can hold multiple missiles depending on their size. My point on this is we can get some low cost, get these positioned around. The Navy’s got to stop being obstinate and unhelpful. They were unhelpful in Guam. A lot of the stink of Guam starts with the Navy saying no to AEGIS ashore. So they got to be more involved in these things. And I think over time, we’re going to have to, you know, have a reckoning about whether MDA is better doing the cruise missile mission at the ground level than the Army. But I can go either way. As a Navy guy, it’s our number one priority. You know, that’s why the Navy’s successful cruise missile defense, because it’s literally the number one warfighting priority for us. And so we’re pretty decent at it. We’re probably suck at our number 10. But the Army cruise missile defense is not the number one priority. They’re kick ass good at the number one through five or six. They’re not so good at number 10. We’ve got to decide whether we slide MDA in there. So I think there’s four or five principles there, four or five programs there, Riki, that we have real opportunities with.”
-Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Board of Directors, MDAA, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Former Director of Operations, U.S. Pacific Command
“So in addition to what we currently have deployed in terms of terrestrial capability, we’re talking about adding space-based interceptors slash sensors. And they will be working in combination with a space-based mesh network transport layer, which is really a communications link. And you can think of that in terms of Starlink, Starshield, or what the Space Development Agency has been putting up here recently with their transport layer. And what this would consist of that would have a major impact is that we would deploy large, dispersed constellations of very highly maneuverable small satellites. It would provide versatile options for detection, tracking, and interception of both current and future missile threats. Such a constellation is not easily countered or overwhelmed.
We would incorporate some of the more modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, peer-to-peer networks, blockchain technology, so that we could have these satellites operate autonomously with swarming techniques that would allow them to create synthetic aperture radars in space and then to be able to peel off and decide who’s going to do what in terms of interception. Remember that our hit-to-kill technology, we don’t use warheads. We use really a kill vehicle for either the ground-based midcourse system or Aegis or whatever. It’s nothing more than a telescope with a diverting act control system and a propellant tank. That’s it. And so the same thing that can be a sensor can also be an interceptor is my point. And that becomes very important going forward.
To give one example, one concept that we’ve actually looked at Booz Allen is that we would deploy a thousand of these CubeSats constellations in 20 orbital planes with 50 of these satellites per plane. And they’d be flying in 10 squadrons of five of these CubeSats per squadron. They would be operating at about 600 kilometers in altitude orbit. And this would provide a very, very effective coverage for the trajectories that we would be interested in coming from Russia, China into the homeland of the United States. As I said, it would be enabled by the communications backbone that we talked about. And what that means is that any satellite on that network would know what every other satellite knows on that network. So they would be able to sort out who’s going to be doing the attacking of which threat and which object.
So think of it this way. Here’s one way to think of it. Think of it as an Uber network in space so that the incoming nuclear warhead suite is considered a passenger. And then these satellites would be considered drivers. And they would sort out which driver is going to pick up the passenger. And that really is very much relies on the same technology like Uber does. It relies on that same technology to be able to do this. This is commercial off-the-shelf technology. And with the advances that have been made in the last my gosh, since 2004, when we started putting GBIs in the silos and we started fielding the Aegis SM-3s at sea and the PAC-3s, et cetera, the technologies have come so much farther. Our processing speeds are orders of magnitude what they were. Our manufacturing techniques with our adaptive manufacturing and with so many different techniques that have really driven down the cost of these with new material science that we can put into these satellites. It’s able to drive our costs down to the point where just as a back of the envelope estimation, we can probably put up 1,000 of these CubeSats and Constellation for much less than 15 to 20, I should say less than $20 billion, probably more like $15 billion to do that. That would be the development, and the launch costs have come down so dramatically as well.
Where we should be today is where we were back in 2004 in terms of managing the program or leading the program. What Mark said is exactly right. You’ve got to have somebody that leads this effort very strongly. I was delegated authorities in 2004 by the SECDEF. It came and originated from the presidential order. In essence, when you think about it, inside the Pentagon, there are three major lines of authority. There are requirements authorities that are embedded in the Pentagon through the JROC and the JCCIS process. There are acquisition authorities that are embedded in the Pentagon that are part of the acquisition executive chain. Then there’s the budget authorities embedded in the Pentagon. Those authorities don’t come to one group until they get to the SECDEF. That’s what causes a lot of what takes so long in that building to get things done, is you have to coordinate and orchestrate between those three lines. What I was delegated was requirements trades authority.”
-Lt Gen. (Ret) Henry A. Obering, Former Director Missile Defense Agency
“You know, architect is a broad word. It’s like integration, right, and it’s defined a lot of different ways. But within the department, you got to look, there’s three different architectures that get developed. You have the system architecture and technical architecture, which is, I totally agree with Mark. That is where MDA is well positioned. They are the experts. They have the engineers develop the system architecture and technical architecture. But the danger is, and this is kind of, this is a bit of the danger with what Senator Sullivan and Cramer have done, is if we just start throwing a bunch of hardware out there and think that we’re going to develop this system and technical architecture without first establishing the operational architecture, which lays in the requirements, the information exchange requirements, what really needs to be done, it’s akin to, hey, building a house, but we don’t have any design plans. Hey, here’s a sink. Here’s some doors. Here’s the cabinets. You know, here’s some piping. Here’s some HVAC. Here’s some wires. But if nobody laid out what the heck the house is supposed to look like, good luck putting together a house that’s coherent, that’s efficient, and that can actually, you know, house a family together. So, that’s kind of the first thing. So, we’ve got to make sure that that operational architecture is laid in and preceded to that would be an operational concept. And again, I’m not trying to get us beholden to JCIDS and the JROC and everything, but I do think that we have got to have an operational concept that would then drive what the architecture would look like.
I’m going to also go back to the point that Mark made about OSD, CAPE, you know, a whole bunch of hands in the pie here and why things couldn’t get done. And I totally agree with him. Let me use a current analogous situation that happened a few years ago with General Hyten. When he was the STRATCOM commander, I was the chief, and Secretary Mattis was the Secretary of Defense. And this goes back to the invent of the NEC, the NC3 section within STRATCOM that helped put together, that helped really coalesce NC3. Prior to that, NC3, as Secretary Mattis said, was done by committee.
You had entities from White House Communication Agency, WAMO, the services, the Air Force, STRATCOM, DISA. Everybody had their hands into NC3. Secretary Mattis looked at General Hyten and said, I cannot have this being done by committee anymore. It’s got to be done by a commander in the field. And he said, John, I want you to take it on. General Hyten, who was the smartest guy around, said, well, Mr. Secretary, I can’t do that. I don’t have the budget and I don’t have the authorities to do that. And lo and behold, the next day, akin to the 2002 Rumsfeld memo for BMDS, Secretary Mattis published a memorandum that gave STRATCOM the authority to run NC3, to include having ANS subordinate to STRATCOM for NC3 acquisition. So we’ve got to make sure that those authorities, those similar authorities would be laid into for Iron Dome for America.
So what I would postulate is that you really have to have two entities. You’ve got to have an Iron Dome for America commanding entity. And then you’ve got to have the architect, the acquisition side of this, which would be MDA. And I would say that NORTHCOM is well-positioned to be the Iron Dome for America commander, but they don’t have the staff to do it. NORTHCOM would have to be significantly beefed up or maybe subordinated to the NORTHCOM commander because they’ve got all North America with a lot of different things going on. Maybe there is an Iron Dome for America commander that’s established.”
-LTG (Ret) Daniel L. Karbler, Former Commander U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command
“It’s worth highlighting two important changes since 1999. First, our nation is increasingly threatened today by countries with large numbers of ICBMs or who plan to deploy large numbers, along with other countries developing or obtaining technology for increasingly sophisticated missiles of all ranges. Second, there have been enormous advances in technology since then driven in large part by commercial companies, which include advances in the ability to build small, low-cost, but highly capable satellites. Advances by companies like SpaceX in launching small sets in large numbers at low cost. Advances in deploying these small sets in LEO constellations. Advances in computing power at the edge that adds incredible capability to these low-cost platforms. Advances in optical comms that enable cross-linking of these small sets and rapidly sharing large amounts of data and processed information.
So here’s what that means for us today, with what President Trump talked about as the revolution of common sense. Because if there’s anything that could use some common sense for how you acquire a new system at the edge of today’s technology, the Pentagon could badly use that revolution of common sense. The President’s Iron Dome executive order makes clear that defending our country from all manner of missile threats, all manner, is among his highest defense priorities. And you know that because when you look at the various executive orders that have been put out, there’s a relatively small number that have been put out for DOD. And this was among the first ones for the DOD.
So then you ask the question, well, where does this money come from? Because our budgets are always insufficient for everything that everybody wants to pay for and needs to pay for. Well, just in the last 10 days, the President addressed the Davos conference, and he set a 5% goal of GDP for NATO, for NATO defense spending. Well, U.S. defense spending last year was about 3.1% of GDP in 2024. So it’s reasonable to expect that missile defense will receive a substantial increase as the U.S. leads NATO in moving toward President Trump’s 5% target. The executive order also makes clear the importance of defending America from space. And this is facilitated by all of the commercial advances I’ve already mentioned. Consistent with the Iron Dome executive order, we must now focus our efforts and spending on first being able to defend the country in all phases against large and sophisticated missile threats. Well, for the ascent phase, this means putting interceptors in space and doing it rapidly in large numbers and at low cost, which again, means using commercial companies to do this. I worked at Tier 1 primes for 20 years. And I know that our legacy defense primes don’t understand words like rapid and low cost. The only thing they understand about rapid is how quickly they bill the government. So if you want to think about how to do this, think about this as the Starlink equivalent for space-based interceptors for the ascent phase.”
– Mr. Mitch Kugler, Former Staff Director Subcommittee on International Security & Proliferation Senate Committee on Government Affairs
“We’re in the perfect moment. This is a historical shift on missile defense. We’ve got less than 60 days. And as you heard the discussion today, all of you, there are some major issues on the processing, the timing, the politics of this, that this answer may not be good enough for the President. You got to look into this and redo it. Because there are critical things here that have to generationally change in the way we acquire, test, and develop that’s being put on the table now. And we’ve got to take risk. And I think we’re right now in that feeling place where we’re getting too many people involved with this thing and made it over complex. And I’m afraid that if that goes forward and they get rejected, then another 60 days, another 90 days, you’re going to go forward.
So this is a critical time to do this. And I’m going to take a quote. I also believe that this President, this administration is Space First. And “If you’re not First, you’re Last.” And this is going to be a driver on everything on this program.”
– Mr. Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman
Click here to watch the virtual event
Speakers:
Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Board of Directors, MDAA, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Former Director of Operations, U.S. Pacific Command
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Henry A. “Trey” Obering, Former Director, Missile Defense Agency
LTG (Ret.) Daniel L. Karbler, Former Commander, U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense, Senior Advisor, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Mr. Mitch Kugler, Former Staff Director, Subcommittee on International Security & Proliferation, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs
Mr. Riki Ellison, Chairman and Founder, Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance
